A HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION OF AGENCY AND STRONG EVALUATIONS
THE FOREGOING identification of the private realm as one where individual agency is realized par excellence cannot go unsupported. Nor can it be abstracted from our prior argument on the intimate connection between the realization of individual agency (beyond systemically mandated role ex- pectations) and the development of role complexity and segmentation. Such a mode of characterizing and defining the private realm would, on first sight, seem quite idiosyncratic and opposed to more accepted defini- tions. There are, as noted in the previous chapter, myriad ways to conceptu- alize the issues of public and private. Indeed, the categories seem to accu- mulate dichotomies in almost too facile a manner: government/economy, market/family, sociability/domesticity, political community/household, and so on. Different scholarly traditions, such as those represented by Jur- gen Habermas, let us say, or by contrast, Philippe Aries, approach the mat- ter in varied, though I would argue, ultimately compatible ways. What I wish to present here is a historical argument for the type of definition of- fered above, to be supplemented in the next chapter with a more analytic inquiry into the same theme.
We may note at the outset that the very construction of that eighteenth- century “publicness” that was theoretically articulated by Habermas and admirably charted by the work of such historians as Robert Chartier (on the development of a literary culture in eighteenth-century France) or Sarah Maza (on the increasingly public nature and representation of private court cases in the same period) had its complement in the very definition and isolation of the private as a realm of value that we find in the writings of Philippe Aries and other Annaliste historians.1 Not surprisingly, both
realms can be seen as defining themselves concomitantly and in mutual recognition. Ultimately, I will argue, both rested on the newly emergent
idea of the individual and of individual agency as coming to exist beyond
the normative expectations of what we would term status and role. Necessary for this development was a reformulation of the reigning terms of sociability and of the laws governing such sociability. As Aries
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himself has noted, “The entire history of private life comes down to a change in the forms of sociability.”2Habermas too notes the intimate con-
nection between the emerging universalistic codes of public communica- tion (i.e., the new terms of sociability) and the constitution of private individuals—of what may be termed socially recognized and (legally) vali- dated selves:
The criteria of generality and abstractness that characterizes legal norms had to have a peculiar obviousness for privatized individuals who, by communicating with each other in the public sphere of the world of letters, confirm each other’s subjectivity as it emerges from their sphere. . . . These rules, because they are universally valid, secure a space for the individuated person; because they are objective, they secure a space for what is most subjective; because they are ab- stract, for what is most concrete.3
Inherent to the eighteenth-century change in the terms of sociability was a reformulation of the terms of familiarity (in the sense of strong evalua- tions used above), which essentially saw the gradual transformation of the meaning of the private from that which was hidden and withdrawn (either on account of shame or the imperia arcana of royal justice, for example) to that which pertains only to the individual. To be sure, both meanings con- tinue to be used today, often contributing to much confusion in our under- standing of the phenomenon. Yet an understanding of the modern distinc- tion between these realms and of its specificity in terms of other forms of social organization rests, I would maintain, on an appreciation of this his- torical dynamic. The often-remarked-upon lack of a “publicness” (in the Habermasian sense) in premodern European culture (allowing for such ex- ceptions as Renaissance cofraternities in Italian city-states, for example) rests on a conception of privateness as that which was hidden and beyond the gaze of a society where the public itself (the whole) was constituted solely in transcendent terms (the corpus mysticum of the Church, universal and apostolic). Only the disembedment of the whole (society) from this transcendent matrix allowed that differentiation of realms through which the idea of public and private in their modern senses emerged. In this differ- entiation a new whole (in Bobbio’s sense) was constituted which turned on the very privileging and valorization of private selves that the new defini- tion of privateness involved. This was reflected, for example, in the devel- opment of modern natural law theory, as manifest in the quote of Habermas above.
But what of familiarity? How, in the reconstruction of the whole in terms less than (the) universal(ity of the Church), was familiarity to be main- tained? The answer, as we all know, was in the universalization of the law as represented and maintained by the edifice of the State (Durkheim’s strong evaluations predicated on the shared orientations to the value of the
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individual that we noted above). However, as we have seen, the very insti- tutionalization of this principle led not only to an attenuation of the relation between the part and the whole (Sennett’s Fall of Public Man, and the current cause célèbre of the communitarian critique of liberalism, as well as a concern which we have seen was saliently felt in the eighteenth cen- tury), but also to increasing difficulty in maintaining confidence among the “parts.” The new terms of familiarity in modernity thus engendered that set of problems, that peculiar type of “risk” (to use Luhmann’s nomenclature) for which trust emerged as an (albeit partial) solution.
So much we have already established, together with the peculiar and contradictory dynamic that the very institutionalization of trust (as princi- ple of generalized exchange) involved: that is, the distinction between its pristine representation in the private sphere of interpersonal relations and its more formal, public and institutional expression in the laws regulating the division of labor in society. This distinction turns, to no small degree, on agency, on what some have termed “voluntarism” (as willed activity, rather than as a candy-striper in the hospital, though the parallels are strik- ing) and the realm of its actualization. For as we have argued above, the forum most amenable to the workings of agency, understood as the ability to negotiate role behavior and expectations, is that of private life4and, not
surprisingly, of the individual agent who stood at its heart. (This is the only definition that maintains a relatively sophisticated social conception of hu- man life but can still see the individual agent as apart from and not reduc- ible to the internalized role expectations of the social structure—what Den- nis Wrong long ago termed the “over-socialized” conception of man.) If we think back to our prior discussion of Adam Smith, we can see this gradual privileging of individual agency (in the crucial realm of conscience, that is, of strong evaluations) over any attempt to root virtue (or for that matter, strong evaluations themselves) in the familiarity of the public realm.
Thus we have seen how for the Smith of the sixth edition of The Theory
of Moral Sentiments the public nature of individual validation gave way to
a much more private locus of virtue and ethical realization.5In this move
the idea of the “impartial spectator,” the “great inmate of the human breast,” as adjudicator of competing moral goods ultimately broke with the naive anthropology of Ferguson and Shaftesbury, with all ideas of innate sympathy as well as with any allegiance to collective norms and mores (with familiarity per se, as principle of generalized exchange), or with what may be termed in the language of republican citizenship the “latent com- munity” as repositories of virtue.6Rather than being identified with public
opinion and a “propriety” rooted in the common standards and social mo- rality of the public sphere, the impartial spectator is internalized (in the sixth edition of Theory of Moral Sentiments). As the “man within” takes the place of the “man without”—or public opinion—as the source of virtue
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(i.e., of familiarity qua principle of generalized exchange), a new, much more private and individual foundation is posited for the pursuit of the public good, and virtue casts off its moorings in the public sphere. Hence- forth the realm of virtue was to be located in the individual citizen himself, that citizen for whom the abstract and impersonal laws of justice (pace Habermas above) provided the necessary framework for interaction and exchange.7
I would thus maintain that Smith at the end of the eighteenth century has given us one of the earliest and most insightful understandings into the new terms of privateness, defined as individual agency, which has come to char- acterize the modern era. He has posited this agency as conscience and placed it at the center of modern ideas of virtue, that is, of the organizing principles of generalized exchange. The only thing left to add to Smith’s analysis remains the historical conditions of this development, which, ad- mittedly, if developed in full, would constitute a book in itself. Yet, for all that, some appreciation is needed of the growing identification of the indi- vidual as both (1) imbued with agency and (2) manifest in the workings of conscience if we are to fully appreciate the centrality of the individual to our contemporary ideas of the private and the problematic nature of trust that it involves. Such an inquiry, structural in nature, will of necessity refer back to our earlier analysis predicated on the ideas of role and role differen- tiation in the making of human agency.
Thus, what I wish to offer here is no more than a brief précis of a possible history. As I can neither reconstruct the history of Western individualism, nor for that matter, of conscience and agency in their relation to the private realm, what I will try to argue—through a few brief examples—is the his- torical and analytical connection between these developments and the type of role differentiation discussed above.
It is in quite conscious rejection of the intellectual history of ideas and rather in the structural conditions of social existence that I would like to seek an explanation of that development of human agency (as an aspect of individual valorization) out of which the problem of trust emerged. Note then, at the outset, the different components of the analysis that we wish to address. Our starting point was the development of trust as a specific mod- ern form of social relations incumbent on the generalization of agency within more and more arenas of the social structure (the afore-noted prob- lem of system limits occasioned by the proliferation of complex roles). Thus, as we have already established, the problems of agency and of trust are intimately connected. We have also explored (in our chapter on trust and generalized exchange) the workings of this connection in the public realm and through that analysis have come to understand the abiding con- tradiction between public and private spheres in the institutionalization of trust and agency as the unconditionalities of modern exchange relations.
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Having briefly explored this contradiction in the realm of political phi- losophy, we must now supplement our earlier understanding of the public, institutionalized role of trust with an appreciation of its more “pristine” existence in and as an aspect of private life. It is here that we hope to pick up the thread left by Adam Smith in seeing this private realm of “pristine” trust as constituted by our ideas of the individual as moral matrix of the social order. This connection is most clearly felt in the development of the idea of conscience as the central arena for the workings of agency. Thus the earlier definition of the private realm as that centered on the individual is further specified as that realm wherein the workings of agency in the form
of conscience must be at play and so trust evoked.
Our attempt to treat the individual as constituted by the workings of agency in matters of conscience is thus very much an attempt to treat the individual as a very special “category of mind,” part of the structure of belief, indeed, of the moral sentiments of a very specific cultural form. For, though the idea of the person may well be, as P. F. Strawson has claimed, one of the fundamental categories of human thinking “which has no his- tory,” the idea of the individual as unconditional principle of generalized exchange in the West does, very much, have a history, one rooted, as I will claim, in some very specific types of structural developments.8And it is by
concentrating on the analytic aspects of this development—as manifest in the growing transformation, complexity, and hence indeterminacy of role expectations—that we can isolate the growing awareness of both the indi- vidual and the private sphere of his (and increasingly her) agency and so come more fully to understand the problem of trust as derivative of these developments. In sum, the development of a private sphere characterized by labile and relatively indeterminate role expectations was itself part of the developing idea of the individual who, I would argue, developed very much in same manner, arising very much as a Durkheimian social fact out of the different role-sets acquired by the person.
To a great extent, the emergence of a private sphere as somehow separate from systemically defined role expectations rested on the prior disengage- ment of the individual from collective identities. This development can be understood both analytically and historically. Analytically, it involves the multiplicity of roles and so the unique configuration of role-sets that be- comes every “individual identity.” Connected to this is the developing pro- pensity to negotiate the contents and expectations involved in each role. Moreover, these developments allow the crucial possibility to judge one role (or role-set) from the perspective of another (or others). As the person becomes a vector of more and more roles, the very idea of the individual becomes a means to specify the unique aggregation of roles that every social actor bears. This very multiplicity of roles carries with it the poten- tial for the mediation and blurring of the boundaries between roles in a
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singular manner and for the progress of an almost infinite self-reflexivity since each role can become the Archimedean point from which others can be judged, negated, modified, and so on. Connected to this process (and facilitating its progress) is the fact that as roles and role-sets proliferate within social formations, the boundaries between the roles become more permeable and the moves from one to the other less structured by formal (ritualized) criteria. There is then more negotiability not only in the defini- tion of each role but also in the moves from one to the other. This too becomes a process that each social actor negotiates alone, in private, rather than within the confines of normative group-held injunctions.
While these analytic traits characterize social formations from Papua New Guinea to Los Angeles, U.S.A., the degree of differentiation between roles and the specific type of roles defined are crucial variables in the devel- opment of individual and collective identities. While some notion of the individual and of the private sphere as separate from the group exists in all known societies, there is little doubt that the type of individualism that we associate with Western European civilization (i.e., the civilization that de- veloped from the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman foundations) is a rela- tively unique phenomenon: it sees in the individual the locus of the moral and political orders, the fount of agency and intentionality, a transcendental subject invested with transcendent rights. It is, moreover, one which came to invest the private sphere with a unique and moral priority.
While the uniqueness of this phenomenon has been studied by scholars ranging from Max Weber and Marcel Mauss down to contemporaries such as Charles Taylor and, in a very different mode, Louis Dumont, the above- noted perspectives on role open some imposing questions for existing tra- ditions and understanding Western individualism and its concomitant ideas of the private sphere as realm of value.9To a great extent, these traditions
see Western individualism as rooted, in one form or another, in the soterio- logical assumptions of Christian belief. That is to say, the very positing of a monotheistic creator God and—especially with Christendom—the “per- sonal” relation of the “individual” to the godhead are, to a large extent, the foundations of our notions of individualism and of the transcendental sub- ject. In sum, this tradition sees the constitution of the individual in, as Troeltsch put it, man’s essence being that of an “individual-in-relation-to- God.” Christianity is thus, in Dumont’s terms, “the emancipation of the individual through a personal transcendence, and the union of outworldly individuals in a community that treads on earth but has its heart in heaven.”10At present I am not concerned with specifying either the precise
origin of such beliefs (whether in the Jewish idea of creation in the image of God or in Christian doctrines of grace) nor in the varieties of its develop- ment and transformation (in Kantian ideas of the transcendental subject, for instance). All those aware of this tradition of sociological thought can
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easily delimit its contours. What I am interested in exploring, however, is the notion that it is not solely in Christianity per se, that is, in its soterio- logical doctrines, that the origin of modern individualism is to be found. Rather it is the specific differentiation, division, and definition of roles that Christianity brought to the cultural, political, social, and economic arenas that are perhaps at the core of our own understanding of the individual.
Let us, for the sake of argument, take only three historical periods that, in the past, have been seen as critical points in the development of Western ideas of the individual: Late Antiquity, the renaissance of the twelfth cen- tury, the Protestant Reformation. All have been identified with the devel- opment of Christian individualism through the refinement of Christian sal- vational doctrines. Is it not possible that the individualism that we identify with these eras is an outcome not solely of the changing content (sote- riology) of religious civilization but of its changing form (in the nature of group affiliations)?11Thus while Late Antiquity is the period of the emer-
gence of Christianity as a world historical religion with its own salvational dogma of grace, it is also the period of the emergence of a whole new set of roles and role definitions identified with Christianity (as, for example, in